Gail leapt to her feet in panic and gasped, almost banging her head on the chair sticking out of the furniture stack beside her desk. “Her? We’re up against her? She’s the enemy behind Teacher’s troubles? We’re dead! We’re all dead! There’s no way…”
“Sit,” Focus Rizzari said. Gail sat and blinked. Charisma. Focus Rizzari’s charisma was still unstoppable. “Calm down. There’s a lot you need to know. The Evil White Queen isn’t Patterson’s only Dreaming identity; you likely run into her more commonly in her political action identity, the White Witch. This isn’t the first time Patterson’s gone after Carol’s mind, and it won’t be the last. I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but you’ve been on Patterson’s radar ever since the day Carol saved your life. Patterson believes the Commander, if left free to act, is the one fated to kill her, and Patterson’s doing her level best to turn this bit of insane magical nonsense into a self-fulfilling prophesy.” Pause. “Now you’re going to call Carol and tell her everything you told me, including what you did last night that showed that the Progenitors are not our enemies.”
“Call? She’s in New Orleans, and…”
Focus Rizzari held up her hand to stop Gail’s words. She took out a crumpled up drawing of a touch-tone telephone and laid it out on Gail’s desk. “You wanted to see some of my tricks?” Gail nodded. “Well, here’s one that always freaks people out: call this number.” Rizzari closed her eyes, put her hand over the drawing, and after a short pause, tapped out ten digits on the phone picture. She called out the number, Gail dialed…
…and, after two rings, Teacher answered.
I am way too outclassed, Gail thought, as Teacher started up the expected over-the-phone mind scrape.
Gilgamesh: August 17, 1972
“Get out of here,” Focus Daumerie snapped at the cluster of people huddled around her. “Shoo. Out. Go, go, go.” She waved her hands at them.
“Really,” Sinclair said. “I’ll be all right. I’m sorry I screamed. I just didn’t expect this to work.” He lay on one of the three beds in the small bedroom, and his face was pale. Gilgamesh didn’t believe for a moment Sinclair’s momentary metasense reacquisition hadn’t hurt.
He looked at Tiamat, who looked back at him. She shrugged and backed out of the small bedroom. Gilgamesh followed and the two members of Focus Daumerie’s household came after, into the narrow hall. Back in the room, he metasensed Focus Daumerie bending over Sinclair again, and the incomprehensible movement of juice. Sinclair twitched, but this time didn’t scream.
Outside, up on the roof, Duke Hoskins paced. Metasensed. Sniffed. “They’re coming today; we have to get Master Sinclair fixed now or we won’t have the chance,” he had said, kicking off their frenetic morning.
“Where now?” Gilgamesh said. The Duke still didn’t know who ‘they’ were. Annoying and terrifying.
Focus Daumerie’s prep cook now maitre’d answered them. He served as the house medic as well. “We have a small parlor down the hall. I can chase everyone else out.”
The parlor was barely big enough for three delicate, old-fashioned chairs. Gilgamesh waited in motionless meditation, Tiamat paced, dodging undersized furniture, and Hoskins, still up on the roof, sank deeper into his metasense scan. The tableau reminded Gilgamesh of those four different times before his transformation when he had waited for his children to be born, trying to control his impatience in a waiting room, while others did the real work elsewhere. He even felt other presences around him, watching, and keeping him company. He hoped the results were as happy this time.
“Carol, we may have a problem,” Gilgamesh said, not bothering to open his eyes in his meditative metasense scan.
“Hoskins’ attackers?” The floor creaked under her feet as she turned.
“No. Something worse. There’s a Crow wandering around out to our west, out in Kenner, partially masked, and wearing my metapresence signature under the partial masking.”
“He metasenses as you. Great,” Tiamat said. She came close and loomed over him. “Who?”
“Someone we thought of as long dead uses this trick, if you want to believe Dynamo,” Gilgamesh said. “Echo. Anyone who gets past his metasense shielding metasenses himself.”
“Fuck,” Tiamat said. “He still a mercenary Crow, working for the highest bidder?”
Gilgamesh nodded. “Supposedly based out of Flagstaff, Arizona, according to Dynamo.”
“I think I ran into him in Detroit,” Tiamat said. She paced in a small circle, nervous, before she stopped to fidget with a gaily painted metal alligator. “I think he might have been involved in the fake Monster setup.”
“We need to do something about him,” Gilgamesh said. Of the Crows Gilgamesh despised, Echo headed the list.
“Tell me the instant he makes any move toward us. I’m not letting him kidnap you again.” Which he had done, once, in the run-up to the Battle in Detroit. Gilgamesh readied his anti-Crow golf bombs, just in case.
Echo, however, stayed five miles away. Gilgamesh eventually figured out Echo sat in a car, likely doing nothing more than keeping track of them. Gilgamesh sunk his mind halfway into the pheromone flow, keeping track of Echo both through his metasense and through the flow.
After three hours, Sinclair climbed out of the bed. Tiamat rushed down the hall and through the door before he took his third step. Gilgamesh was almost as fast.
“I can see!” Sinclair said. He was holding on tightly to Focus Daumerie, and his eyes shed tears, but his face wore the happiest smile that Gilgamesh had seen in years. “I’m a Crow again. Thank you, Guru Gilgamesh.”
Tiamat hooted and started a round of applause that spread to Focus Daumarie and her people.
“You are all most welcome,” Gilgamesh said, wondering who, in the Pheromone Flow, also hooted and applauded. More than one had haunted his mind while he waited; he suspected the Madonna of Montreal and the eyes of the Progenitors were the ones celebrating. “All I did was set this up; Focus Daumarie and Arm Hancock did all the hard…”
“They come,” Hoskins said, with his wall-penetrating command voice. “Mercenary soldiers, no Transforms, around a hundred and twenty, about two hundred yards out, all heavily armed for Monster combat. Battle stations, everyone.”
Tiamat didn’t hesitate. She picked Sinclair up and she sprinted so fast they flew.
This was no coincidence. The enemy knew what they were doing, and held off attacking until the Focus exhausted herself.
In the distance, Echo started his car and slowly inched toward them. Gilgamesh had a bad feeling Echo was their enemy’s spotter.
Carol Hancock (August 17, 1972)
Battle stations. What a joke. I saw two problems with this fight, three if you counted the likely destruction of Focus Daumarie’s household. First? Focus Daumarie’s current domicile was on the edge of the New Orleans French Quarter. Any firefight would endanger innocents by the score. Second? Monster weaponry. Even Monster hunters quailed at using ‘Monster guns’, the .60 caliber and larger weapons, inside city limits. In most cases the Monster weapons used magnum rounds with enough kinetic to penetrate two brick walls. Bad, bad news.
I suspected our enemies carried more than Monster weaponry, though. For suppression fire you wanted relatively low caliber automatics. The only automatic Monster firearms were built for fixed use only, or for use by Major Transforms, and regular Monster weaponry was slow. I knew the area around Daumarie’s household from repeated scouting sweeps, a twisty maze of alleys penetrating a non-grid and irregular street pattern. Daumarie’s ‘block’ was five-sided, with two three-sided blocks to the east, and so on and so forth. Counterattacking and closing with the enemy would give us an advantage, and would be unexpected tactics for a Focus household.
“They’re coming in six groups of approximately twenty each, from several directions, now on foot,” Hoskins said, as I reached the roof. Focus Daumerie and her household maintained a rooftop garden up here, and I put Sinclair down among the herbs and potted key
lime trees. The newly fixed Crow moaned and put his head in his hands.
“They’re coming for me,” he said. “I just got healed so they’re going to cripple me again.” His voice caught as he fought not to cry.
I wasn’t convinced. After the fight in the piney woods, Gilgamesh expected another attack on him. Hoskins suspected he had pissed off the Hunters sufficiently to earn him a place on their target list. Tonya thought our hidden enemy was the first Focuses and their thugs, going after Daumerie for helping a Crow as well as harming my reputation as someone able to protect Focuses and Crows…and Gail and Lori’s surprise phone call revealing Patterson’s attack on my dreams and their evidence that the Progenitors weren’t our enemies supported Tonya’s supposition. I also couldn’t discount the possibility that we faced the FBI again, making yet another attempt on me. Dammit, a week here had been too fucking long in one spot!
“Ma’am,” my little surprise said. She stood up from the protected emplacement Gilgamesh had made for her. Arm Elizabeth Whetstone. A third predator to surprise our enemies with. She was young, but she had graduated Keaton’s training, and anyone who could say that would be damned good in a fight. “What do you want me to do?”
On the entire trip here, the two of us had stayed close to each other and under Gilgamesh’s protections. Even a senior Crow who pierced Gilgamesh’s shields wouldn’t be able to tell two Arms from one. Since then, she had either been within Gilgamesh’s fixed protections, much better than his mobile defenses, or she had been under mobile defenses with me. She had been bored silly, and even regular evening sparring sessions with Hoskins hadn’t added much excitement, but she was hidden, and I didn’t think our enemies had figured out her presence.
“Be a sniper. I want you here, under the defenses, and I want you guarding these three approaches.” I pointed. “Nobody gets to the household by one of those paths. Can you do that?”
“Yes, ma’am,” she said, eager for the excitement and a good dose of bloodthirsty slaughter.
“Good.” I tossed her magazines, books, and copies of Zielinski’s medical papers to the gravel roof to expose part two of my little surprise. A weapons locker. I gave Whetstone the sniper rifle and ammo and she grinned, the tight, ugly grin of a predator. “Kill a whole fucking lot of them. But no civilians!”
I pulled out my own hand-cannon and ammo, and then tossed a duplicate to Hoskins, who caught it with his own predatory grin. I also stocked Hoskins and myself with a couple more normal firearms and left the rest for Whetstone. These were Major Transform weapons, and of the Major Transforms here, only the predators had the temperament and physical strength to use them properly.
I hoped my little surprise would be sufficient. In the face of an incoming small army, I wished I had managed more.
I scanned our surroundings and spotted only one group. They approached on foot down the narrow street, twenty beefy men, their weapons hidden, all wearing matching dark blue uniform-like clothing. They showed ample threat awareness and military-style training. The fact they could keep their weapons hidden meant no anti-Monster long guns, thankfully. My best guess was the Smith & Wesson Chopper, a .66 shoulder-fired short-barrel rifle made for close-quarters Monster combat, one that did not use magnum rounds.
They were using the classic attack-a-Focus-household plan: surround and charge. I had used this chestnut myself, in the past. The enemy’s plan would work for both capture and extermination contingencies. We had, perhaps, 90 seconds, before Focus Daumarie and her household were all dead.
They wanted a Focus household to play with?
I would not comply.
“Gilgamesh?” I couldn’t see or metasense him. He was getting better.
“Tiamat.”
I had talked to Gilgamesh for hours about his new Guru-level capabilities. The inventive stuff was for the future, and he and I had brainstormed hundreds of tricks a Guru of his talents would be able to use, given preparation and training time.
We hadn’t had the time.
However, he had been carefully redoing his old tricks ever since he started his um ‘quest’.
I gathered eyes. “We’re going to do the first Battle of Quad Cities.” Except for Whetstone, they had all been there, and she had wargamed it with Keaton at least once during her time as a student Arm. “In miniature. From the other side. Gilgamesh, distribute the disguises.”
“Rwaaarh!” Hoskins and I approached the west squad, scattering dented aluminum garbage cans and two mangy cats as we pounded feet. My predator effect emulated Chimera terror. By appearance, we appeared as the Hunters Enkidu and Montana Winter, the oversized wolf and the horse sized otter with a black death’s head emblazoned on his white belly fur. Needless to say, we charged the enemy. That’s what Hunters did.
The trick in this plan was speed. In the first Quad Cities fight, Enkidu and Montana Winter had been seemingly everywhere, running from one beleaguered Hunter company to the next as the undisciplined Focus attackers blew their coordination signals and straggled in toward the Hunter army’s vast camp. We had never seen any intelligent combat tactics from the Hunters before, so they worked.
Behind us, Gilgamesh and Sinclair shot at or near the enemy with .62 Winchesters, low-end Monster weapons; Sinclair wasn’t up to firing at an enemy; he would be hard pressed to avoid panicking as he shot at the blue sky. I hoped he didn’t miss. Daumarie’s best shooters, all four of them, also shot .62s at the first group, and if they missed they chewed street. The rest of the world would see part-Monster Hunter pack women, thanks to Gilgamesh. The rest of Daumarie’s guards hustled the non-combatants out of their home and across a short alley, letting the other enemy squads enter their home unhindered. If Whetstone couldn’t hold off the attackers from the east, the non-combatants were dead.
A scene of carnage awaited the enemy once they entered Daumarie’s house, courtesy of Gilgamesh. His Guru-level illusions would last through nearly a minute of examination by a group of normals. To the enemy, Daumarie’s household appeared to be the typical charnel pit aftermath of a Hunter attack.
I stayed low to the ground, as did Hoskins. The Hunter illusions didn’t pop as combat started, as Gilgamesh’s normally did. Hoskins and I waded into the merc squad and they dispersed oddly, into groups of three and four, instead of the usual ones and twos. This wasn’t standard military procedure, but a good defense against hand-to-hand combatants. I had to slow down as I knifed them, spending too much time dodging out of the way of their firearms. Still, both Hoskins and I killed all twenty before they realized their return fire didn’t damage the illusions. Fast, but slower than I wanted.
Hoskins and I ran through an alley and connecting side street as the bodies were still falling. In the distance, I heard the careful pop, pop of Whetstone’s sniper rifle and the deep-throated bark of the return fire of the attackers as they shot their Choppers.
Gilgamesh’s illusions on us expired as Hoskins and I charged the next enemy squad. I pitied the group of screaming tourists we scattered, cameras around their necks, out to sample the wilder parts of New Orleans, a silly endeavor at ten in the morning. I used a trick I had been saving for a rainy day and, holding Hoskins’ arm, made both of us invisible as we neared the enemy. Five paces from the second squad Hoskins roared, a leonine Terror roar I recognized as Hunter Orion’s, only different, a trick from his bag of devious tricks. A short range concentrated Terror. Customers at the po-boy shop next to us screamed.
Hoskins’ roar broke the second squad, several dropping their weapons as they fled before us, down a short alley and on to Oleander, where they attracted car horns and car tire squeals. We didn’t bother chasing them or killing them. We didn’t need to, not yet, and the fewer bodies we would need to make disappear at the end of this fight, the better. Whetstone was giving us plenty to handle already. Besides, we didn’t have the time to waste.
As I turned away from the alley, I caught an unexpected sight – each of the Choppers the enemy dropped had a metal cord atta
ched to it, with an M8 grenade at the end of the metal cord. The grenade’s pins were gone, likely still attached to the attacker’s utility belts. I grabbed Hoskins and pulled him away from the alley mouth as the first of the grenades detonated, releasing the expected white cloud of acidic fumes. Automatic screening for fleeing panicked troops, and one that proved unexpectedly difficult to metasense through. Our enemy had a devious mind.
“Left, next squad, entering the Daumarie household,” Hoskins said, ignoring the white smoke grenades. He panted and sweated, drained by the exertion in the muggy New Orleans heat. I sensed him using up élan at far too fast a pace, all in an effort to keep up with me.
Hoskins and I continued to play Hunters, even without our illusions. After a momentary pause, as the passing cars slowed down, sped up and weaved around us and the grenade smoke, we ran for Focus Daumerie’s house. We caught the third squad partway in and partway out of the house, their commander jabbering on a walkie-talkie and attempting to figure out what happened to the first two squads and, still believing Gilgamesh’s illusion, attempting to figure out who might have beaten them to the slaughter. And who the hell was shooting at squads four and five from the roof.
We Terrored them, but they didn’t break. Too much time had passed, and too many walkie-talkie conversations, and they knew we were coming. Automatic fire hit me, two rounds of the non-Monster weapon variety, and I burned juice to keep moving. I rolled through the open front door with Hoskins close behind and knifed four of the mercs, throat, belly, belly, and brain. I gut-sliced the fifth as he shot his Chopper past my right ear. I grabbed a subgun from his belt and potted two more mercs as I used another trick to leave flashbulb-like impressions of me, fighting, in people’s minds as I moved. By the time I wounded two more, dropping none of them, they all thought the room littered with Hancock illusory images. By this time, I had made my way from the foyer to the living room. I hit the floor and scooted over to hide behind a well-worn sofa; my placement of the mental flashbulb images was enough to induce the mercs to shoot at each other and finish the job we started. One of their damned smoke grenades detonated on the far side of the foyer, adding to the mess.
The Shadow of the Progenitors: A Transforms Novel (The Cause Book 1) Page 42